Sometimes, I feel as if I am stuck in a slow-motion dream. My wife dreams all the time—I do not. But when I dream, I often have the same dream.
In my dream, Teresa and I are fleeing the KGB. We don’t know where the boys are and we are trying to get out of a building without being shot.
Unfortunately, in the dream I am stuck in slow motion. I feel panicky and desperate, but can’t move. The officers are just around the corner, but I cannot move fast enough to escape before they come into sight. I usually wake up right as they are catching us—never sure what actually happens.
Do we die? Do we escape? What happens to our boys?
What’s even more frustrating is no matter how often I have this dream, I never get to the end of it. And sometimes, I have felt that way about sexual purity. Will I ever get the end of this struggle and be totally free? Is it possible to never face sexual temptations? Do men always have moments of victory then moments of failure?
I can feel stuck in slow motion, knowing what I need to do, but powerless to do it.
Apparently, Paul felt this way too.
I Do What I Don’t Want to Do
When I read Romans 5, 6, and 7, I can feel a tension rising inside myself. Everything he says is wonderful and true, but feels ridiculously idealistic.
We are to be “slaves of righteousness, not slaves of sin” (Ro. 6:19). And he talks as if this is reality: “But thanks be to God, that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed, and, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness” (Ro. 6:17-18).
First of all, even as a Christian, I have not always been “free from sin.” Secondly, I don’t know that my obedience always “comes from the heart.” Usually, it feels as if it comes more from obligation and out of necessity.
By the time I get to the end of chapter 6, I feel as if Paul has become grossly disconnected from my own experience. And as I dive into chapter 7, excited because the title in my Bible says, “Released from the Law” (which I like the thought of), I begin facing all those old lies of whether I am actually saved. Do I have the Holy Spirit inside of me?
Paul goes back and forth so much, I feel as if I am being yanked side to side on a leash, getting dizzier and dizzier as he dances through thick forestry of theology. And if you don’t know what I mean, grab your Bible and open it to Romans 7. It’s ridiculous, if I may say so.
“Or do you not know, brothers…” “Likewise, my brothers….” “What then shall we say?”
I don’t know, Paul. You tell me.
It’s about that time I am caught off guard by Paul’s own testimony: “For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate” (Romans 7:15). For the first time since he said, “No one is righteous, not one,” I feel Paul actually knows what I am going through; as if he, himself, has also gone through this.
Our Mistaken Concept of Victory Over Sin
You see, one of the greatest lies we can get into our heads is that victory over sin equals days without sin. Victory over sin has nothing to do with us. We are a broken, sinful people. We will sin.
Jesus has worked victory over sin. He is the one who goes days without sin—He has never sinned.
The days we are able to go without sinning are days we are so convinced of His victory that the temptations we face hold no power over the life and freedom we have inside. If we then experience a day, later on, when we do sin, it is always because we lost sight of the victory God already won. We weren’t so convinced, that day.
Instead, we listened to the louder voices suggesting we are empty, God’s forgotten about us, or we need this fulfillment right now.
We Can’t Be Victorious. . .
Paul’s point in Romans 7 is that the law shows us our sin. Moses, when he wrote about the law in Deuteronomy, said the law is life to those who obey it; and the law is death to those who do not obey it (Deut. 30:11-20).
God’s law is good. If we could obey it perfectly, it enables us to experience connection with God again. His law shows how He designed humanity to live and relate with each other and with Him.
Just as those who obey the law of gravity experience life and freedom when they put gravity to use, and those who disobey the law of gravity experience death and bondage when they ignore it, so is the law of God. Paul gets really complicated in this passage, but he says,
For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree with the law, that it is good. So now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. (Romans 7:15-20)
In other words, the law shows him that what he is doing is not what he wants to do. “So,” he says, “It is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me.”
He is not doing the sinning—not he as he was made to be, that is.
The sin, which corrupts him, is doing the sinning. For he knows that nothing good dwells in him, “that is, in my flesh.”
Our “flesh” is us as we are corrupted by sin, not as we were designed to be. Paul says he has the desire to do what is right, which is what we were talking about earlier. We all want to do right, we all want freedom. We don’t want to have to hide things. We want to offer value to others, to fight for them.
But, as Paul says of himself, we lack the ability to carry it out. We do not do what we want, we keep doing what we do not want to do. Therefore, it is not us who do it, but sin that dwells in us.
As God made us (and he made us good and perfect, living in perfect security and harmony with Himself) we want and are able to do what is right. But because of sin, we can’t do what is right.
So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? (Romans 7:21-24)
If we could obey the law of God, we would experience life. But we can’t.
Because of the law, evil lies close at hand. In other words, because of the law, we know what is right but our rebellious nature naturally does the opposite.
So, this law is death to us because it shows us how imperfect we are. In and of ourselves, we are hopeless. That’s what Paul is saying in Romans 7.
He wants us to feel the tension within us, the despair of not being able to live out the ideal—God’s perfect design. Why does he want us to feel hopeless: “Who will deliver [us] from this body of death?”
So chapter 8 can fully land its punch.
. . .Unless We Are in Christ
“There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1).
We as humans cannot get done condemning each other, comparing levels of victory and freedom. In fact, sometimes it seems we thirst for comparison.
If I can rate myself better than my brother, surely, I am closer to righteousness than he is, and that makes me feel good about myself. And I suppose we do thirst for comparison because we have fallen, fleshly natures and comparison is of the flesh (See Gal. 5:20; 2Co. 10:12).
But condemnation and comparison are rubbish in Christ. None of us have the ability to carry out what we want to do, the ability to live as God designed.
And because we all lack righteousness—what it takes to stand before God—God did what the law, “weakened by the flesh,” as Paul said, could not do (Ro. 8:3).
God delivers us from our bodies of sin. Not us.
Jesus sets us free from our “bodies of death” (Ro. 8:3-4). Jesus was condemned for our sin. Therefore, we are free.
Even though you and I may still feel the reality of sin within ourselves, as Paul talked about at the end of Romans 7, if we are “in Christ,” if we believe in Jesus, there is no condemnation.
I found this unbelievably freeing because part of what kept me in the cycle of victory, then failure, was that I would look at other people and see them going longer without sin. In fact, some of them didn’t seem to sin at all. And as I looked at them, and compared myself with them, I saw myself as being a fake.
And the more I saw myself as a fake, the more I acted like a fake. I gave in to temptations when others weren’t looking and did my best to stand strong when they were.
And the more I acted like a fake, the less I even tried resisting temptations because I didn’t believe I was the real deal.
Some people won’t struggle to the extent we do simply because they have not been exposed to the material and temptations we have (and that may be reason to consider what we consume).
But some of you, unlike me, didn’t even ask for the material that caused you to get into porn, the material that provoked lust within you. Right now, you are likely fighting thoughts of despair and discouragement because you see others around you experiencing more days without sinning—even more, days without temptation. But you may be missing the fact that they have not had the exposure you have.
I say all this not to give an excuse for giving in to sin. I say this to bring to light the reality that each of us, in and of ourselves, would give in to the same degree as the other if exposed to the same temptations.
Left to ourselves, we continually choose the opposite of God. And any level of lasting victory we experience is solely because of what Christ has done; not what we ourselves are doing.
Getting my eyes off of others and no longer comparing myself with them, realizing that when all our fig leaves are pulled back we are all marred and broken by corruption, freed me from self-condemnation and ignited within me a desire to be even closer to Jesus than ever before.
How All Things Work Together for Good
Grasping by faith what God has done for me in Christ gave me the first taste of true freedom. It was the beginning of being able to live as God designed me to live.
You see, I grew up well acquainted with these Scriptures. As I said, I had memorized Romans 6 as a strategy for freedom. I knew we were “justified by faith” and that “there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ,” but I had no clue the weight of meaning these verses carry.
All I knew is that while in faith I am justified, and while in Christ I am not condemned, I am also supposed to consider myself dead to sin (Ro. 6). Yet, I did not feel dead.
On the contrary—I felt quite alive to sin, to my flesh.
People often quote Romans 8:28 when tragedy strikes: “And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to His purpose.”
And while we can look at other parts of the Bible and see that God can work tragedy for His glory and use it for good, I do not believe we are being fair to the message God is speaking through Paul here in Romans. In fact, I will go so far as to say what Paul is talking about has nothing to do with tragedy.
Paul says in Romans 8:16, right after talking about how we are given a Spirit of adoption and can call on Daddy, that “the Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with Him in order that we may also be glorified with Him.”
What does Paul mean by “suffer with Him”?
Well, he has already talked about the sin that dwells in us, making us do things we don’t want to do. And he goes on to say, “the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.”
Paul is talking about suffering we experience because of being in bondage to corruption, because of bodies filled with sin.
I used to think Jesus would set me free from all sin, all temptation and evil. I thought that if I was truly free in Christ life would be a breeze.
But that’s actually not true.
Paul goes so far as to say the whole creation has been “groaning together”—even we who have the “first fruits of the Spirit” (Ro. 8:23). Even those of us in Christ experience an inner turmoil because our bodies are not yet fully redeemed, we are not yet completely set free from the corruption of our flesh.
Suffering with Christ, then, has to do with refusing to live contrary to God’s design even though I may really feel like it, even though I may feel alive to fleshly passions.
The cliché response—“Jesus is the answer”—actually doesn’t mean everything we use it to mean.
Yes, Jesus is the answer, but He may not be the answer for your temptation with lust today. Your answer may simply be to suffer against it. Resist it. Embrace the pain of refusing to indulge in something you feel genuinely alive to.
This is when it takes faith—when we have to be “fully convinced”—because full restoration, being completely set free from the bondage of corruption, is yet to come.
We will be fully restored with God, someday; but not now. Complete restoration with God is the hope we were saved for (Ro. 8:24, Eph. 4:4). It is the final act of God’s promise with Abraham back when He called down a curse on Himself if He failed to follow-through. God is working to redeem everything, even though there is pain along the way.
Living in the Spirit on this earth means intense, excruciating suffering against our flesh.
But as we suffer, we can be confident that “all things work together for good, for those who are called according to His purpose.”
In the middle of the grinding tug-of-war battle we face against indulging in a little porn or sexually compromising activities we can rest in the fact that the pain we experience as we suffer is not in vain. As long as we resist, resist, resist, God shapes our hearts so we look like Christ (Ro. 8:29).
And not only is He making us look like Christ, but His Spirit is with us in the middle of the battle interceding on our behalf, helping us in our weakness (Ro. 8:26).
God is for us; not against us.
He wants to see us win. So He gets entirely involved in making it possible for us to come out victors as we suffer against our flesh. He does this by getting in the trenches, Himself, and suffering for us on the Cross.
In this way, provided we suffer with Him by resisting urges we feel passion for but know dishonor God as God, we will also be glorified with Him. We will see victory. We will see healing and complete reconciliation.
Resisting Today
Recently, my phone buzzed with a text that read, “Valentine’s Day is coming. Wanna hook up? I am fun and ready for sex. Please hurry!”
I have seen emails with messages like this in my junk inbox before, but I’ve never received this message as a text. I don’t even know how this person (or company) got my number, but it was clearly from one of those advertising sites for “hooking up with singles in your area.”
I had nothing to hide—I knew I had done nothing wrong. This was a “junk text.” What messed with me the most, however, was how excited I got by the text.
It was one of those moments where I felt almost exhilarated at the thought of having a secret affair. And as I entertained the notion, I found myself wandering to my email and checking for junk messages just like it, hoping to see something or read something that might keep the thrill up a little longer.
But what was I looking for?
Did I really want to cheat? Did I really want to cloud my conscience with images of women who are not my wife? My son lay sleeping in the next room, I could hear him waking up. Did I really want to drive a spear into his soul (and the soul of all those close to me) by choosing to be unfaithful to his Mom?
It grieves me how quickly little things like this can throw me off kilter, and I wish I would have deleted the text and removed any thought of it from my mind immediately. Instead, I battled the temptation to indulge privately all-day long. Only, (praise God!) I never pursued anything further.
While perusing my junk box, I realized I was using this offer for immediate thrill as a way of filling a void deep inside, a way of covering a sense of shame I felt. I realized that what I was looking for was a deep sense of competence.
You see, Teresa and I had just had a difficult conversation a couple of days before, the kind that left me rather discouraged and feeling unappreciated and incompetent. It really had nothing to do with her—she needed to say what she said, and it was good she did.
But in my broken state, because of the “groaning” I experience in this fleshly body—even though I have the Spirit of God in me—I felt really empty. I felt disillusioned and like I was going to lose things that propped me up, that gave me a sense of fulfillment and self-worth.
So, when this temptation came and offered to satisfy a deep desire for intimacy, suggesting I have something of value to offer someone (even though this person obviously didn’t know a thing about me)—and this temptation came privately—it felt almost too compelling to resist.
In fact, it felt painful to resist.
But by the grace of God, I was able to resist.
I didn’t try memorizing Romans, didn’t quote chapter 6. I didn’t even go for a jog, although I suppose either of those could have helped.
Instead, I stopped still, in the middle of perusing junk mail, felt my emptiness and identified that I was flirting with lust because of how I felt inside. I acknowledged I was toying with temporary satisfaction because I was looking for something to cover my shame and soothe my pain.
And then, in the emptiness of my own soul, I asked Daddy to come and fill me. It was really quite a simple prayer. The power was not in the words. The power was in the fact that I saw why the perverted alternative looked so appealing, and that I gave space for my Creator to speak life and peace into the deepest longings of my heart.
I had victory that day; not because of my level of discipline, but because Jesus has opened the way for my soul to reconnect with my Father.
And I happened to be convinced enough it was real I was willing to suffer the little agony of foregoing a lesser pleasure, that would have only ended with deeper shame and more guilt, in hopes of receiving greater glory and a far more meaningful sense of security and peace.
Have you found it hard to resist temptation? How does it feel to consider the fact that in the suffering you go through in resisting temptation God is conforming you into the image of Christ? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
